Opening Day: Or, the Return of Satchel Paige Read online

  Hasslebrow, the owner, sent for Buck that afternoon. “You didn’t say anything about ever playing this game on your application.” The owner stared at him accusingly.

  “It was some time ago,” Buck replied, aware of the odor of Atomic Balm hovering about his throbbing left arm. The new trainer had insisted he practice on Buck, for the Grouper were a notoriously injury-prone outfit. “And besides, I was applying for a job as batboy.”

  “Yes, yes, but it could have helped your chances, any prior experience, things like that.”

  Buck shrugged. “I was the only...older... person who applied. You said so yourself.”

  Buck hoped his remark would pass on by the owner. In fact, it had been Mr. Paige himself who had taken him aside once, when Buck, flush one payday, had wondered why their money couldn’t buy them hotel rooms uptown.

  “What you’ll find is you can make it in this country, bein’ black. It’s bein’ old that really bothers folks,” Paige had said, with a soothing hand upon Buck’s shoulder.

  Which is why the man had always been so canny about his own age, Buck supposed. He had his clever aphorisms, of course: DON'T LOOK BACK, SOMETHING MIGHT BE GAINING ON YOU, and the like. But as to his exact age, Mr. Leroy Paige had always been circumspect, a lesson that Buck had taken to heart. He’d made sure to smudge that spot on the application form that Hasslebrow had before him, and tried to stand extra tall before the owner’s inquiring gaze.

  There was a book on Hasslebrow’s desk the size of a counter-top oven, and the owner turned to lay his hand upon it reverentially. “I checked in the National Register of Baseball,” he said. “There was a Leland Wilson played for the Whippets, Mars, Pennsylvania, the season of ‘46. That the same guy as you?”

  “Them, too,” Buck shrugged. Also the Eagles and the Crawfords, the Marcos, the Red Caps, and at three different city brands of Clowns. Not to mention a brief stint with the Monarchs, where he and Mr. Paige had shared some time together.

  He might have mentioned his baseball experience to the owner, he supposed, but he would have felt foolish. The decision to apply for the job had been difficult enough, the result of a sudden desire to see the inside of a baseball park once again as much as anything else. He might have followed the others along to the “bigs,” he had always told himself. But, with their own league folded and his father recently died in the mines, he had decided there was no more time for games, and he left the rocky diamonds of Western Pennsylvania with the certainty he’d never be back. Never mind that he had fanned the brawny sons of other miners in fabled numbers; never mind that his skill as a batter was broadcast through the taverns as far afield as Uniontown; never mind that this boy from tiny Mars roamed the outfield as lithely as a panther. He had promised his mother that his playing days were done, he would stay home and take care of her, and that was that. For more than 50 years.

  Thus, he could not say he was completely surprised by what had happened when he threw that first ball earlier in the day. He had been accumulating some kind of cosmic credit all these years, surely. Was he not entitled to some reward for his sacrifice and faithful service, even if there was no doorman’s union, no pension for the sons of independent miners, no retirement home for devoted sons. It must have been fate which had led him into the ball park, which chased away the usherettes and ball girls, and which gave Hasslebrow his brainstorm. Which tipped the arm of Wattles so that the ball could tumble to Buck’s feet. And which guided his arm through his prodigious throw.

  And now, Buck realized, he could proceed. He could save, and be comfortable, and with the season over and his name moved up the waiting list at last, he could turn over all his earthly assets to the owners and operators of Golden Years Village–his color no concern, not in this century, thank God, not so long as he could pay and thereby be assured of a place in the sun for what remained of his life: shuffleboard and sailing, ballroom dancing and dart-tossing, water aerobics and canasta, not to mention assisted care as necessary, for as long as his lungs and his heart should last. Security, that’s what he would have. He’d spent a lifetime without much of that; he was determined to have it at the end of his life, at least.

  The owner of the Grouper, meantime, had leaned forward in his leather chair to jab his cigar across the littered desk. “You let me worry about the decisions around here. You just take orders. And this is the next one. As of right now, you’re the new third base coach. The Sox are sending Obregon to Hartford, and you’re going to take the job for $175 a week.”

  But Buck shook his head steadfastly, and the owner’s satisfied smile collapsed into astonishment. “I won’t do it,” Buck told him firmly. “Not for $175, anyway. I’m holding out for Obregon’s pay.”

  II.

  In the end, Buck signed

  a new contract for $302.50 a week, plus bonuses for all wins over .500, plus incentives for the team’s total number of stolen bases, and an attendance escalation clause. The owner fumed, but Buck had read the newspapers and knew about how such things worked in baseball these days. He knew he was still receiving less than the departed Puerto Rican. Still, he’d nearly tripled his batboy’s salary, and he would be able to add significantly to his nest egg.

  “Listen,” Hasslebrow had told him, grumpily adding his signature to the contract he’d sketched out hastily on a lined yellow tablet, “it doesn’t matter so much what I’m promising you, because if we don’t draw in a few fans, this whole operation is going belly up, kapish?”

  Buck glanced at his signature, made sure all of the points they’d negotiated were listed. “You’d shut things down in the middle of the season?” he said, skepticism heavy in his voice.

  Hasslebrow glared back at him. “I wouldn’t have a choice. I’m in hock to my eyebrows. If we don’t draw some people into the stands, we’ll all be out on the street.”

  Buck thought about it for a moment. “If you’re worried about drawing fans, why would you buy a team like the Grouper?”

  “Because they were cheap,” Hasslebrow said. “The Orlando Mice were for sale, too, but they play good ball. That put ‘em out of my price range, okay? Now why don’t you go do what I’m paying you too much to do and coach. Help me pull off a miracle. We open with the Mice, and if we win that game, we might get some of the fan base back. Now beat it.”

  With that, their encounter had ended and Buck made his way back down to the field to find that the team was on break, off for lunch at the training table, otherwise known as the lunch buffet special at the nearby Pizza Hut. He supposed he could have gone after them and joined in, but something about his encounter with Hasslebrow had dampened his appetite. He contented himself with tidying up the cluttered dugout area while he waited for their return, picking up discarded soft-drink cans–and a few beer cans too, he noted with some concern–thinking about what this latest upswing in his fortunes promised.

  Perhaps he could even move out of the shabby hotel room he’d taken while he waited out his admittance to Golden Years. If he were lucky he could find a place with air conditioning, a luxury he had gone without since retiring as doorman at the condominium tower in Tampa, where daily he had opened the doors to usher the privileged residents in or out, handing them their mail, helping with their groceries, pocketing their five-dollar Christmas tips, never dreaming that there might be any end to his days but waiting for the inevitable in a stuffy basement apartment.…

  But then, one Wednesday afternoon during the very week prior to Buck’s scheduled retirement, the glossy brochure of Golden Years Village had drifted to the floor of the condominium’s vestibule to land before Buck’s feet like an omen, another delivered to him by Fate. It had fallen from a stack of mail clutched by Titus Richthoven, former owner of a Pittsburgh steel mill and notorious, even among a remarkably tight-fisted group, for his miserly tipping.

  Buck had bent down to retrieve the fluttering brochure and had called after Richthoven that he’d dropped something, but the ex-steel magnate had already goosestepped into the ele
vator and punched the button for the penthouse floor. The doors slid shut on Richthoven’s overbearing stare, leaving Buck with the glossy, four-color brochure in his hands–spread open like an oracle’s runes to a double-page layout of oldsters–one or two of them black, another quite possibly Oriental–biking, swimming, dancing, ping-ponging, weaving and potting, dining and Kareoke-ing, gardening and lounging at lakeside–doing all things in life, it seemed to Buck, that he had scarcely done.

  Buck was about to drop the brochure in the trash, but found himself unable to do so. He read and re-read the copy, becoming more and more intrigued, for it had begun to dawn on him that he needed something to look forward to once his tenure at the Towers had expired.

  And the more he read, the hotter his blood ran. The brochure made it clear that life at Golden Years was within the reach of all– yellow, black, or beige–who were willing to sign over the entirety of their assets and pension plans, including Social Security. (“Who needs Social Security when you have Golden Years security?”) There were various levels of purchase and lifestyle maintained at Golden Years Village, of course, each level designated by the tag name of a precious metal, but Buck was used to a kind of unspoken caste system. To him, a man who’d been turned away from flea-bag hotels alongside the great Leroy Paige himself, the notion of a “Copper-level” lifestyle at Golden Years did not greatly disturb him. He did not need “Platinum” or “Titanium” level retirement; given what he’d put up with in his time, he could probably have managed with “Lead.”

  He’d made the free phone call that same afternoon, mailed in his deposit, and received confirmation of his place on the waiting list by return mail. He was set, then, at last. He had arranged a secure ending to his days.

  There remained only the matter of waiting...and now, with his increased earnings potential, the possibility of moving up from “Copper” to “Molybednum,” which included access to an afternoon buffet, among other things, had wormed its way into his brain. Something to think about, indeed.

  That afternoon, with the team members returned and Buck having taken up his position as the newly designated third base coach, Lucco, the manager, had begun infield practice by sending several sharp liners suspiciously close to Buck’s place just outside the foul line. Sharon, the displaced chief usherette and fiancée of Lucco, had appeared in the stands to sun herself during practice. When Buck had to duck one particularly vicious drive, she rose on one bronzed arm, her formidable breasts ready to spill from her scanty top.

  “Careful now, Frank,” she called from her place behind the dugout. “We might need that man in relief.”

  And it was true, the Grouper needed help from any quarter. As Buck had learned from a post-lunch conversation with chunky center-fielder Wattles, the Sox, major league parent team of the Grouper, were notoriously miserly in the support of their farm system, Triple-A, Double-A, Single-A alike. Moreover, the attitude of Grouper management had been equally abysmal in years past. Faced with declining subsidies from the Sox as well as with declining gate receipts from fans appalled by the listless style of the team, last year’s Grouper owner had fled to Mexico with the final month’s payroll and two of the bustier ball girls.

  Now, two weeks after the opening of Spring Camp, Hasslebrow, who had mortgaged his successful string of South Florida supermarkets to rescue the American Pastime in his hometown, sat in his lonely office, wondering if his predecessor hadn’t been the wiser man.

  Season ticket sales stood at the historical nadir of 7. Lucco spoke to Hasslebrow rarely after the dispute over cashiering the usherettes. And when Hasslebrow called the hometown paper to suggest a series of articles boosting interest in the upcoming season, the sports editor had exploded into laughter before hanging up.

  Wattles himself–last year’s leading Grouper hitter at .345, but still without a call from the majors– admitted having lapsed into malaise during Spring training. Hasslebrow freely shared his suspicion that the young man had taken up drugs. Lucco simply called him a hot-dogging malingerer.

  Olivarez, ace of the pitching corps, was still recuperating from a severe mangling of his pitching arm given him by his roommate’s fighting pit-bulldog. Second baseman Hamilton, the only player on the squad to field over .900, had yet to report to camp. He was somewhere in Miami, it was said, completing the final week of an engagement with his fledgling night-club revue.

  The remainder of the team was a collection of overaged beer guzzlers, castoffs willing to play for miniscule salaries, and pimpled youngsters with nervous swings. Last year the team had won a score of games and lost five times as many, finishing dead last, thirty-six games behind the Orlando Mice, eventual winners of the Double-A World Series. In another era, Wattles explained, the Mice and the Grouper had been deadly rivals, their meetings drawing capactity crowds and producing first-rate baseball, but now the Grouper had fallen so low that even the hated Mice treated them more with bemusement than disdain.

  “What’s really eating Hasslebrow,” Wattles confided, “is the fact that Colden Battey owns the Mice.”

  “Who is Colden Battey?” Buck asked.

  “Battey’s the guy that owns the Vaughn-Dexter supermarket chain,” Wattles told him. “He’s always lording it over Hasslebrow. First it was about who had the real supermarket chain. Now it’s about who’s got the best baseball team. Hasslebrow’d chop off one of his little fingers to beat the Mice, you know. The problem is he’s the only one who gives a crap.”

  And it was true, Buck thought, as he watched the Grouper go through their afternoon drills. Though he had not personally observed the Grouper in their glory days, of course, he could readily appreciate the general ineptitude displaying itself before him. Lucco bounced a chopper toward

  Hamilton’s backup at second base and the ball hopped untouched into short center field, where Wattles now lounged in the lush grass chewing an enormous wad of gum. Minoso, the third baseman who claimed a distant relationship to the famed Cuban, MINNIE, deftly fielded a sharply rapped fungo from the manager, then fired his relay several rows up into the bleachers behind first base.

  “Good speed on that one, Minnie-Two,” Wattles called.

  “Get off your ass,” Lucco called to the center fielder. “Run off a little of that winter fat or you’ll be on the bench next week, hot dog.”

  “Cabron,” Minoso mumbled, loud enough for Buck to hear.

  Lucco swung viciously then, and caught the ball squarely, sending a sizzling liner toward shortstop. Pisby, a seventeen-year-old draftee from Fort Kent, Maine, turned his gaze at that very moment away from Sharon’s miniscule outfit and back toward the plate. As it smacked him between the eyes, the ball caught the visor of his cap, a piece of luck that may have saved his life. As it was, he lay unconscious for several tense minutes before a bucket of water dumped by Buck brought him around.

  “That ought to do it for the day,” Lucco said, as the boy rose unsteadily. Sharon, who had jumped down to the field, was dabbing at the imprint of baseball stitching just above the boy’s pale and prominent nose. She was using her own damp beach towel, her breasts pressed against Pisby’s arm.

  “Poor little fellow,” she cooed.

  “Thanks, ma’am,” Pisby breathed, his eyes at her chest.

  “A goddamned bunch of idiots,” Lucco grumbled, walking off toward the dugout.

  Wattles came to Buck’s side about that time. “Better get your mind off that young stuff, Pops,” he observed. “You could keel over just thinkin’ about it.”

  Buck nodded. “A lovely young woman.”

  Pisby uttered a low moan and crumpled back to the grass.

  Later, in the tavern where Wattles had insisted they go (“Just one cold brew, Pops. It’ll clear your brain.”), Buck learned further details of the Grouper’s miserable fortunes.

  “Old Lucco never made it past Double-A as a catcher. But he was a hell of a manager, once. Had a mid-season shot with the Indians eight or ten years back,” Wattles continued. “But he couldn�
��t stand the pressure. They sent him down after he tried to strangle the General Manager in the locker room one night, is the way I hear it. Never got to the big leagues again.” Wattles smiled lazily and signaled the waitress for another round. “But that’s why it’s called the BIG league, baby. Got to have that talent and the temperament.”

  Wattles voice had risen as he finished, and two delivery men with potato chip insignia on their shirts waved at him from their place around the curve of the bar.

  “Hey, slugger,” one called. “That our prize rookie with you?”

  “Number-one draft choice of the Sox,” Wattles said, clapping Buck on the back. “Right, Pops?”

  Buck raised his glass to the men. “I am, in fact, the third base coach.”

  “Promoted from batboy,” Wattles added. But he changed his tone when he saw Buck’s eyes cloud. “Seriously, though. This man was batting champ of the Pennsylvania Negro League in 1939.”

  “Yeah?” the first man said, regarding Buck more closely.

  “Then maybe we use him at second, eh?” The second man was grinning at Wattles. “Hamilton, he will sing the national anthem, disco style, and we put in the rookie here at second, no?”

  “Not a bad idea, Hector.” His companion joined in. “Then maybe we could get a bunch of those midgets, you know, like BILL VEECK did, to draw walks, and a couple of sprinters off the Pro Track tour for pinch runners, and maybe a couple of women to beef up the pitching, and we could have a pretty good year.”

  “And bring some giant mouse traps out on the base paths. That’s about the only way they’ll beat the Mice...”

  Buck watched Wattles’ jaw tighten as the men joked. Finally, the stocky outfielder swung down from his stool and nudged him.

  “Let’s go, Pops. These assholes don’t understand talent.”

  “Couldabeenadamngoodteam,” Wattles was saying, his tongue thickened by the beers he’d carried from the bar to the park where they now sat.